EW YORK - Here on the streets of New York, Al Gore met political disaster 12 years ago, fleeced like a Tennessee lamb on Broadway.
Just 39, bursting with youthful ambition, Gore got a humiliating 10 percent of the vote in the 1988 New York primary, finishing well behind the victor, Michael Dukakis, and the runner-up, Jesse Jackson.
But a dozen years later Gore is back, confident, and favored to defeat local hero Bill Bradley in the New York primary. The streets that once held torment may serve as a victory lap.
''In 1988 he was barely constitutionally old enough to run and wasn't comfortable with either the social or cultural currents of New York,'' said Mark Green, the city's top elected Democrat, after watching Gore campaign on his turf last week.
''Now he is on top of his game. He knows the issues. He knows the city. He's comfortable with himself,'' Green said.
Gore still offers obeisance to New York's ethnic and demographic fiefdoms - teachers last Thursday, Irish-Americans and silk-stocking liberals on Saturday, Jews and gays yesterday. But it is a far cry from 1988, when Gore arrived in New York after five victories in the Southern primaries to pit his moderate ''New Democrat'' philosophy against Dukakis and Jackson. On paper Gore's strategy seemed plausible: He would try to win the votes of moderate Jewish and Catholic Democrats, while his two foes split the liberal vote.
''What followed was a spectacle at once so abrasive and pathetic as to make many question whether Gore would ever again be taken seriously as a national candidate,'' wrote Gore's biographer, Robert Zelnick.
Gotham's loud and florid mayor, Ed Koch, endorsed Gore and then used the campaign for his own self-promotion. Egged on by the city's tabloid press, Koch and Gore heightened racial tensions by pitting Jews against blacks. The mayor literally elbowed Gore aside at news conferences and photo opportunities.
Gore compounded his troubles with clumsy pandering to Jewish voters, and by attacking Dukakis for giving prison furloughs to convicted criminals, an issue the Republicans seized upon and used to assail the Massachusetts governor in the fall campaign. Gore seemed in over his head. He went home to Tennessee and suspended his campaign.
When Bradley, the former New Jersey senator, caught Gore in the polls last fall, it looked as though New York might once again serve as a painful test for the vice president. Bradley had been a star for the New York Knicks and was advertised on New York television for 18 years. He had his former Knicks teammates behind him, along with Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, filmmaker Spike Lee, and Koch.
But the changes Gore made in his campaign organization and personal style paid dividends here. So did his ability, as an incumbent vice president, to lock up the endorsements of national and local labor unions, which still wield great influence in the Empire State. African-Americans, the most loyal Democratic group during the Clinton-Gore years, stuck by Gore; so too did the party's liberal activists, after seeing how he tailored his positions over the years to better suit their tastes.
The dramatic race between Republicans George W. Bush and John McCain, and the ongoing Senate campaign between Hillary Rodham Clinton and New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, have thwarted Bradley's attempts to garner attention here. The power of the famed tabloid newspapers has been eroded by dozens of new cable-TV channels, Internet sites, and other news outlets that have as much clout. Bradley's ads may have had Spike Lee, but Gore's commercials ask, ''Who has the experience to keep our economic revival going?''
In the end, said Green, Bradley's chance to score an upset dissolved when he failed to beat Gore in either Iowa or New Hampshire. Green used a Wall Street analogy to explain. ''Just as the capital markets discount expected news, so do the voters here,'' he said. ''And the expectation, right or wrong, is that Gore is going to win.''
To forestall any last-minute surprises, Gore has run a tightly scripted and controlled campaign that despite a raucous debate with Bradley at Harlem's Apollo Theater, or the breaking news that a longtime Democratic fund-raiser had been convicted on corruption charges - keeps him away from the tabloids and extinguishes potential brushfires.
Gore's appearance last week at P.S. 163, the Alfred E. Smith Elementary School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, serves as an example.
Citing the demands of his schedule, Gore took no questions from parents or the press, and instead gave a 10-minute speech before the TV cameras, complete with the requisite sound bite: an attack on Republicans for supporting school vouchers.
''They seem to think that just because schools in New York begin with P.S., that education is just an afterthought,'' Gore said. Whatever disappointment the parents might have felt about being used as props was vanquished.
''It's amazing. He answered all our questions before we could even ask them,'' said a charmed Betty Miller, the parent of a third-grade pupil at the school, after Gore left. ''I'm going to vote for him.''
